The Hollow Man

right engine hadn’t quit on you, you would’ve had it down okay. Are you sure you haven’t flown before, Mr. Bremen?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then how do you account for the—”

“Luck,” said Bremen. “Desperation. I was all alone up there. Plus the controls are really sort of simple with all of the automation.” Plus reading the pilot’s mind almost every second of the ten hours or so flying from Las Vegas, added Bremen silently. Too bad he wasn’t there when I needed him.

“Why were you in the plane, Mr. Bremen?”

“First, Lieutenant, tell me how you know my name.”

Burchill stared a moment, blinked, and said, “Your fingerprints are on file.”

“Really?” Bremen said stupidly. The fuzziness of the medication was less now, but the static of pain was rising. “Didn’t know I’d been fingerprinted.”

“Your Massachusetts driver’s license,” said the sergeant. His voice was as close to a monotone as a human voice could come.

“Why were you in the plane, Mr. Bremen?” said Burchill.

Bremen licked his dry lips and told them. He told them about the fishing camp in Florida, the body, Vanni Fucci … everything except the nightmare with Miz Morgan and his weeks in Denver. He assumed that if they had his fingerprints, they would eventually connect him to Miz Morgan’s murder. That was not in the lieutenant’s or sergeant’s thoughts at the moment, but Bremen knew that someone would make the connections before long.

Burchill leveled his basilisk stare at him. “So they were flying you back to New Jersey so that the don himself could whack … could execute you. They told you this?”

“I picked it up from things they said. They evidently didn’t mind talking in front of me … I guess they assumed I wasn’t going to be telling anyone.”

“And what about the money, Mr. Bremen?”

“Money?”

“The money in the steel attaché case.” Four hundred thousand some, schmuck. Some drug money you know something about? Maybe we’re talking about a deal that went wrong at twenty thousand feet?

Bremen just shook his head.

Sergeant Kearny leaned closer. “Do you gamble in Las Vegas very often?”

“First time,” mumbled Bremen. His exhilaration at awakening still alive and relatively in one piece was being replaced by pain and a renewed emptiness. Everything was over. Everything had been over since Gail had died, but Bremen now had to acknowledge the end of his flight, his mindless, brainless, fruitless, heartless attempt to escape the inescapable.

Burchill was saying something. “… to get his weapon?”

Bremen filled in the rest of the lieutenant’s question from the echo of mindtouch. “I grabbed Bert Cappi’s pistol when he fell asleep. I guess they didn’t think that I’d try anything while we were flying.”

Only a madman would try something with so many guns in a light plane, thought Lieutenant Burchill. He said, “Why did you try it?”

Bremen made the mistake of attempting to shrug. His cast and taped ribs stopped him from completing the motion. “What was the alternative?” he rasped. “Lieutenant, I’m hurting like hell and I haven’t seen a doctor or nurse yet. Can we do this later?”

Burchill looked at a small notebook in his left hand, returned his flat gaze to Bremen, and then nodded.

“Am I being charged with something?” asked Bremen. His voice was too weak to hold any real outrage. All he heard was tiredness.

Burchill’s face seemed to sag into even more folds and wrinkles. The only intensity there was in the eyes; they did not miss anything. “Five men are dead, Mr. Bremen. Four of them are known criminals, and it looks as if the pilot was also connected with organized crime. Your rap sheet is clear, but there is the question of your disappearance after your wife’s death … and the fire.”

Bremen could see the shifting vectors of the lieutenant’s thoughts, as ordered and precise in their way as the laser-intense concentration of the poker professionals he had been playing with less than two days before. This guy burns his house down and disappears after his wife kicks it, Burchill is thinking. Then he just happens to be in Florida when Chico Tartugian is getting whacked. And then he just happens to be in Las Vegas when Chico’s killer and the other Leoni boys are making a money run. Uh-huh. The pattern’s not clear yet, but the elements are there—insurance money, drug money, blackmail … and this so-called civilian says he pulled Bert Cappi’s .45 and started blazing away. Some weird shit here, but it’ll sort itself out soon enough.

“Am I being charged with something?” Bremen repeated. He felt himself sliding sideways, slipping into the haze of pained neurobabble that filled the hospital: consternation, outright fear, defiance, depression, and—from many of the visitors—guilty relief that they were not the ones lying in the beds with plastic bracelets on their wrists.

“Not yet,” said Burchill, rising. He nodded the sergeant toward the door. “If what you say is true, Mr. Bremen, then we’ll be doing some more talking soon, probably with an FBI agent present. In the meantime we’ll post a guard on the room so none of Don Leoni’s people can get at you.” Burchill’s image of the uniformed police officer who has been posted down the hall for the past eighteen hours. This Mr. Bremen is going nowhere, either as witness or arraigned murderer or both.

The doctor and two nurses entered as the homicide detectives left, but Bremen was fuzzy enough that he could barely concentrate on the man’s terse medical chatter. He learned what Burchill’s eyes had already told him —learned also that the compound fracture of the left arm was more serious than the lieutenant had known—but the rest was detail.

Bremen let himself slide away into emptiness.

EYES

At the moment Jeremy is lying in the St. Louis hospital, I am mere hours away from watching my carefully constructed universe collapse forever. I do not know this.

I do not know that Jeremy is lying in the hospital. I do not know that Gail exists or has ever existed. I do not know the paradise of shared experience or the perfect hell that this ability has brought Jeremy.

At this moment I know only the continued pain of existence and the difficulty of fleeing from it. At this moment I know only the despair of separation from the one thing that has given me solace in the past.

At this moment I am dying … but I am also hours away from being born.

Sightless, Unless

Bremen dreamed of ice and bodies writhing in the ice.

He dreamed of a great beast rendering flesh, and of terrible cries rising from a sulfurous night. Bremen dreamed of a thousand thousand voices calling to him in pain and terror and the loneliness of human despair, and when he awoke, the voices were still there: the neurobabble of a modern hospital filled with suffering souls.

All that day Bremen lay abed, rode the waves of pain from his injuries, and thought about what he might do next. Nothing much came to mind.

Detective Burchill returned in the early afternoon with the promised FBI special agent, but Bremen feigned sleep and the two acceded to the head nurse’s insistence and left after half an hour. Bremen did sleep then, and his dreams were of ice and writhing bodies in the ice and of cries from the pain-racked darkness around him.

When he awoke again later that night, Bremen focused his mindtouch through the babble and rasp to find the